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Bancor Sets New Record with $153 Million ‘ICO’

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Justin OConnell
Last Updated

Israel-based prediction market blockchain project, Bancor , has set a new record by raising about $153 million in ether, the native digital token of Ethereum. The crowd sale, which concluded June 12, brought in more than 390,000 ether.

The prior record, set by the Ethereum the DAO. It raised $152 million. 79,323,978 Bancor Network tokens were created per the ICO, as documented by Ethplorer.io , an Ethereum token-explorer focused on ERC20 Standard tokens by blockchain startup Everex . The top token holders hold nearly 85% of the tokens. Fifty percent of tokens were sold to the public. The remaining 50% was allocated for future use.

Data on trackers suggest 10,885 buyers participated. One buyer purchased $6.9million BNT, roughly $27 million. The Ethereum network was busy throughout the day, and buyers reported transaction delays. Bancor set an initial funding target of 250,000 ether but tried to deploy this via a smart contract transaction to change the crowd sale limit. Bancor reported this did not work as desired, resulting in the crowd sale going on for two hours longer than planned. Complaints were registered on social media about dropped transactions.

Ethplorer.io

“Due to overwhelming demand and traffic, and massive malicious attacks (details coming soon), many have not been able to get their transactions through, including us,” wrote Bancor on its blog . “We have decided to extend the minimum time to THREE HOURS in order to allow the Ethereum network to process all PENDING transactions and allow everyone who’s transactions have failed to RETRY. Our intention remains to include all early contributors.”

Tim Draper of VC fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson is reported to have purchased a stake in the ICO. The blockchain project team recently met with the President of Liberland, a proposed country in Europe by ‘anarcho-capitalists.’ Bancor has stayed away from the term ‘initial coin offering’ in favor of ‘Token Generation Event ’ (TGE).

Venture Capital firm Blockchain Capital participated in the Bancor Network Token allocation event. “We are thrilled to invest in such an innovative and thoughtful project as Bancor,” Blockchain Capital stated. “What attracted us was first and foremost the team. With two decades of experience in end-user applications, a strong network of supporters and advisers, the Bancor team has exactly the kind of DNA we want to see more of in the Blockchain space to help bring the value revolution to the mass market.”

Blockchain Capital’s previous projects include video-sharing website MetaCafe and social games studio Mytopia. “Many teams today in the blockchain space expect to raise capital without building a product. We loved how Bancor spent over a year developing their MVP, put it out on their private testnet and used their own application and smart tokens to run their bounty programs. This is the kind of hard work we want to see before token allocation events,” said Stephens.

Bancor announced a partnership with Gnosis amid the crowdsale hysteria. “We love the wisdom of the crowd, especially when there’s real skin in the game to incentive integrity and authenticity,” he said. “At Bancor, we’re big believers in the potential of prediction markets to harness this wisdom, and we plan to make the Bancor Network the absolute simplest way to engage with these type of markets and other blockchain products that connect people to our collaborative potential.”

The joint GNOBNT Token Changer is  “a decentralized liquidity pool of GNO and BNT, encapsulated in a Smart Token. 4,000 GNO and 400,000 BNT (~$1,000,000 value each) tokens will be deposited in a Gnosis-Bancor multisig wallet following the token allocation event on June 12 at 2 pm GMT.”

Featured image from Shutterstock.